So Very Dark

So, for our most recent project, we were to design an ‘unconventional’ greeting card. (i.e. no valentines/anniversary/birthday…something weird)

This was a two week project–during the first week we had to design 4-5 rough drafts of our ideas:

<–the main idea I was working with was sort of a ‘world conquest congrats’ thing. I was going to have it say ‘Congratulations…’ on the front in fancy script (white) and then ‘…on your world domination.’ on the inside, or something like that. I have some of my notes written on the front of this one–I wanted to have the starburst be a gradient (dark in the center) and the background be a turquoise, rather than royal blue (I only had one turquoise marker).

<–another ‘world conquest’ idea…the guy looks a bit constipated, if you ask me.

<–this is one of the two ideas that we decided to go with…I wanted kind of a ‘WWII propaganda poster’ feel to it…the final result looks very different than this…a lot because I didn’t really draw any of it except for some overpainting. My teacher made it very clear to all of us that we did not have to draw our cards–we were free to use images from elsewhere, and he discussed that with me as well–what I ended up doing was finding some period posters (online and in a book of soviet posters that I borrowed from work) and melding and collaging to try to get across the feeling that my teacher and I discussed. I’m not sure I’m happy with the end result…probably a lot because I feel like a cheater for not doing all of it by hand…but overall I think (hope?) it works okay…perhaps I’m too close to it and will feel better later…*fingers crossed*…but aside from putting many many man hours that I don’t have into this, I kind of had to jump in, collage my heart out and hope for the best:

<–on the inside, in fancy script reads: ~Congratulations~ (next line) on your recent world domination. The area where this took the most work is the guy with the red banner…this is originally from a poster for War Bonds with Uncle Sam holding the U.S. flag and wearing a suit including a blue starred vest and red and white striped pants, so I overpainted the flag and suit and added proper shadowing, took away his beard, overpainted his hair, spruced up his face to make him look younger… Anyway, I’m still really nervous about this one, but not a lot I can do about it now if it sucks anyway.

<–this concept was actually one that Briggs gave me when I was looking for more ideas. It was a ‘congratulations on surviving your parachute malfunction’ card. This card, in contrast to the other one, changed very little visually from concept to final. It was mostly just refined:

<–I drew this all except the anvil, because 1) anvils are complicated thing-a-magijs that I didn’t want to do a crappy crappy job of drawing, and 2) I liked the idea of the real anvil in the cartoon setting. This person has a nice stomach.

While the outside stayed mostly the same for this card, in contrast, my teacher though that ‘parachute malfunction’ was too specific (which is what I liked about it) and suggested that instead, is should say something like ‘oops’ and/or somehow suggest that the giver is responsible in some way for the very massive f*** up suffered by the receiver. I went with ‘…my bad.’

I like this card best. It makes me smile when I look at it. I like the bird, who was more than a little influenced by Mo Willem’s Pigeon.  And I really like that person’s stomach. I’m rather jealous of it.